Santo Trafficante Jr., The Florida Mobster Who Made A Startling Deathbed Confession
Dennis Caruso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesSanto Trafficante Jr. and mob lawyer Frank Ragano.
Carlos Marcello isn’t the only mobster who’s been accused of playing a role in the JFK assassination, however. Florida mobster Santo Trafficante Jr. also supposedly had a hand in Kennedy’s death. As Frank Ragano, a lawyer for both Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, later claimed, Marcello was the “central planner” and Trafficante and Hoffa provided “the shooters.”
Like Marcello, Trafficante had a grudge against the Kennedys. Ronald Goldfarb, a lawyer who worked for Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s, wrote in the Washington Post that Trafficante was enraged that his wife had been subpoenaed before a federal grand jury. Trafficante, like David Ferrie, also hated Fidel Castro and had even tried to have the Cuban leader killed.
So when Jimmy Hoffa allegedly raised the idea of killing the president, Trafficante was amenable to the idea of becoming a JFK assassin. “This has to be done,” Hoffa purportedly said, according to Ragano, and Trafficante and Marcello started putting the plan into action. Trafficante even reportedly told an FBI informant before the assassination that John F. Kennedy was “not going to make it to the [1964] election. He was going to be hit.”
Getty ImagesSanto Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa allegedly provided the “shooters” in the JFK assassination.
This informant, however, was later murdered. So was a mobster named Johnny Roselli, who claimed that Marcello and Trafficante had plotted the assassination with Sam Giancana. And so was Giancana, just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations sought to interview him.
Trafficante also didn’t seem to be shy about discussing the assassination allegations. As Goldfarb notes, Trafficante allegedly toasted the president’s death with Ragano, quipping: “Our problems are over. I hope Jimmy is happy now.” Trafficante later purportedly told Ragano on his deathbed in 1987 that the Mafia eliminated Hoffa. Shockingly, he also said this: “Carlos screwed up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should’ve killed Bobby.”
An added twist to Trafficante’s story is that he allegedly worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to try and kill Fidel Castro. When he appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Trafficante claimed he’d worked with the CIA to assassinate the Cuban leader, saying: “I thought I was helping the United States government.”
